Equallogic Firmware 5.1 is released

Equallogic has now released firmware version 5.1 for early production use, this means it is completely supported to use in your environment. I mentioned this new release in my Dell Tech Day blog post last month, the major features in this new release are as follows.

1. 5.1 firmware brings support for the Dell Equallogic FS7500 clustered file system solution, this will allow you to add the FS7500 to your Equallogic group to offer file level storage controlled via your Equallogic array. For more information on the FS7500 check out the product page here >> http://www.equallogic.com/products/default.aspx?id=10465
2. Support for Active Directory (LDAP) integration for users authentication
3. Support for VMware Thin Provisioning Stunning – When thinly provisioned volumes with virtual machines reach a pre-defined threshold vCenter will now stun (Suspend) the virtual machines, when additional space is created on the volume the administrator can resume the VM’s. With the current method in previous versions of the firmware the volume is mounted offline resulting in the virtual machines crashing
4. 10 GB controllers now support Data Center Bridging (DCB) my understanding of this is that it allows the performance characteristics to be kept at a contestant state instead of having peaks and troughs etc. I will complete a dedicate blog post about this in the future
5. Auditing of administrator actions, full auditing of administrator actions via the GUI or the CLI

and the big feature

The load balancing within the Equallogic groups is now at the sub volume level, the load balancer will balance the work over the members ensuring work is moved from members that under the most pressure.

I am currently running 5.1 in my test environment at the moment and look forward to rolling it out to customer after initial testing. The latest firmware can be downloaded from Equallogic.com by customers with an active support agreement.